My First week at Chodort

How time flies, I am writing this on Sunday morning in the kitchen after breakfast of porridge and tropical fruit. I have also spent some time planning a short visit to Sesheke in the Western Province to visit the school that I taught at when I first came to Zambia in 1968.  From what I hear the road from Livingstone to Shesheke is in very good order and the journey will take a little over an hour. When I lived there it was a whole day in the dry season and if it was raining it was better not to attempt the journey on the Zambian side of the border. The road was better traveling through Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe crossing back into Zambia over the road bridge linking Zimbabwe with Zambia at the Victoria Falls.

Students for the vocational courses on offer at Chodort - Carpentry, Tailoring and Computing will start their courses tomorrow – 13 January -   I understand that the courses will fill over the first couple of weeks of this the first of a three  term year. The instructors have been busy preparing their classrooms and their course material over the past few days.

My first week on Campus which is about a five minute walk from where I am staying was spent getting to know people and what they do. I was invited to sit in on all the staff meetings and this was invaluable in giving me an insight into the current issues facing Chodort. I also started to speak with key   individuals in the carpentry production unit and collecting information from them to enable me to appreciate the challenges that are confronting the staff. I had prepared a business diagnostic questionnaire together with a marketing questionnaire and these have been with the staff since before my arrival. I hope I will be able to start reviewing staff responses early next week. Jenny Featherstone, the Principle was here, there and everywhere and spends a great deal of her time on matters that could be dealt with by other members of her team. I hope that I will be able to help her to find more time to devote to strategic planning.

Having the computing instructor available to help me get my laptop and phone working in Zambia has been a godsend. I am not sure that I would have managed without his help. I have Wi-Fi both in the office and back at the house and although the connections are a little slow they do seem to work   most of the time. I have a colour printer and supplies of paper.

I am not sure that Chodort has a landline phone, I have yet to see one. Almost everyone that I have met has one, if not two cell phones (mobiles) and they never seem to turn them off. There does not seem to be any law against using a mobile whilst driving or if there is no one seems to pay any attention to it. 

The roads are very busy in and around Choma and although the main road through the town – The Livingstone to Lusaka road – is in good repair the side roads are far from it. Most are not paved and deteriorate during the rains. I have not yet driven a vehicle  but have been both a front and back seat passenger  in some rather bumpy journeys.

On Saturday afternoon I was invited to the Macha Malaria Instutute which is situated at the Macha Hospital which is about 70km from Choma along a largely unpaved road. It took about an hour and a half to get there and I was able to meet Dr. Phil Thuma, the Director who I believe is a world authority on Malaria.  

The Malaria Institute at Macha (MIAM) is a joint collaborative effort - to develop a center of excellence in rural Zambia that will carry out state-of-the-art malaria research - including molecular biology, entomology, epidemiology and clinical studies.

The partners involved in this   are the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg  School of Public Health; Macha Malaria Research Institute (MMRI), which is a US-based non profit organization; Macha Mission Hospital   and the Zambian government through its Ministry of Health.

The vision they have   is that some day malaria will no longer cause such a heavy burden of suffering and death in children living in this part of Africa. Dr. Thuma told me that the incidence of malaria in the Macha area has been reduced by 90%.

I have started to read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver a tale set in the Belgian Congo of 1959. It is the story on one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in post colonial Africa.

The book awaits – more next week.